Index Magazine Interview

SC: I don't want it to become trendy like all our other favorite
places.

VD: I'm eating here with Bibbe Hansen, the starina of starinas
and her sexy husband Sean Carrillo, who is much younger then
her--she robbed the cradle. She snatched him at the age of 15 from his
parents in East LA, basically kidnapped him. Bibbe is a female
pedophile. . .

SC: She took me across state lines . . .

BH: I took him to New York.

VD: Bibbe was running a Brown slavery ring at the time for horny white
ladies who like chorizo. That's why you removed Sean from his very close
knit Latin family

SC: She introduced me to Andy Warhol.

VD: Warhol, the art and movie world. They have been together
since the late 1970's. Sean has been her child husband/bride for almost
20 years. He is still a radiant youth. Bibbe is, of course, an ageless
wonder. One of the 77 wonders of the world. A former Warhol star. The
youngest of the Warhol firmament. You come from Bohemian Royalty. You've
been the salon/madam/mistress to all the movers/shakers/filmmakers and
artists/musicians in LA since the dawning of the punk rock era, into the
post punk era to the present. You are a modern day Gertrude Stein.

BH: A better looking version of Gertrude Stein hopefully. Poor Gertie,
she wasn't exactly a looker.

VD: During the first wave of LA punk you encouraged a lot of
bands here. You inspired, you were the muse, you suckled them and gave
them peanut butter and jelly sandwiches.

SC: The Screamers were one band. And then--The Controllers.

BH: Al Hansen, my dad managed the Controllers. He was
into punk rock before I was. He was the one that turned me on to it. I
was a Hollywood wife then. Married to Beck and Channing's dad, David
Campbell. I always had a wild streak, but I was in wild recovery
living with my staid husband--a wonderful, musician, arranger and
composer. I needed a rest from being a maniac wild child. I had the
children, Beck and Channing, and things were very calm for me for about
five or six years and then my father--

SC: She lived in Marlon Brando's old house in Laurel Canyon. This
house had marvelous stairs up and down and everywhere. In the book "Breakfast
With Brando" Anna Kashfi is always talking about falling down
these stairs. The house had 15 different sets of stairs on all crazy
different levels.

VD: So you gave up that world and that life and took a teenage Chicano
lover and left Beck's father for him

BH: Oh yeah, I gave it all up for love. I've always been like that.
That's my pattern.

SC: When she left David all she took was the pearl's around her neck.
And the rings that she later had to pawn.

BH: Yeah that about sums it up, I've lost almost all the good jewelry.
The Bulgari stuff is all gone. All I have left is some Robert
Lee Morris. Maybe a few good pieces left.

SC: But we survived.

VD: You've always lived a life of art. Taking risks, with places and
situations where it wasn't always the most comfortable, but you went
with your instincts in where you had to be. You were even doing art as a
child and involved in art movements as a child and performing..

BH: Janet Kerouac and I had an all-girl band together as
children. We grew up together in New York and went to school together on
the lower east side. We ran around the city getting into incredible
amounts of trouble.

SC: They were both juvenile delinquents.

BH: We were stealing things, drugs, scams; you name it. We did wind up
with a recording contract though. We hung with this other girl, Charlotte,
and we were like the Three Musketeers.

VD: You were frisky, a libertine from birth

BH: Well, pretty serious jailbait, at least. I'm talking 12 or 13
here. We hustled our way into a recording contract on Columbia's Colpix
label with Don Rubens. The people who wrote our A-side song were
the ones who wrote "Denise". You know? "Oh ,
Denise, doo be doo"? And Murray the K's mother who co-wrote
"Splish Splash I was Taking a Bath", she wrote the
flip side of our record.

VD: What was your all-girl group called?

BH: The Whippets? With Janet Kerouac. We put out a
record that was the answer to the Beatles "I Wanna Hold
Your Hand." Ours was called "I Wanna Talk With You".
This was with me, Janet and Charlotte. I was also doing Happenings
with my dad and experimental theatre. With my father, I was involved in
the whole downtown experimental theatre thing at Judson Church
and LaMama and Living Theatre. I also had a traditional
theater background where I went off and did summer stock in upstate New
York. The Adirondacks. I did summer theatre in Saranac Lake,
then later at the Lake Placid Playhouse--both well-respected. I
did several seasons with them as a kid, that was my summer job. I would
go up and play the juvenile leads. Diary of Anne Frank, The Bad
Seed, Helen Keller.

VD: I don't think many people are aware that you had this background.

BH: I started working acting on film for the first time at age 13.

VD: Was that when you did your Warhol
screen tests?

BH: I made several films with Andy. The first was Prison. I
was 13.

VD: That's why you are known as the youngest of Andy Warhol's
superstars. How was it working with Edie?

BH: I loved working with her. She was kind to me. And she taught me a
lot of make-up tricks. Like the big sister I never had. We'd do speed
and play with cosmetics for hours. Andy was wonderful, He made an
enormous impression on me and set a certain tone that has followed me
all my life. I understand in later years, things changed, but at that
time in life he had this wonderful tolerance, acceptance and
inclusiveness. In a world that was very exclusive and standoffish, he
was very welcoming, and I was just a little kid. A child.

VD: You weren't like any regular little kid. You were innately
sophisticated. I've never seen the movie Prison. I've only read
about it. I did read that you are very authoritative in the film, your
complete stance is that of someone much older than 13. You are telling
your story in the film very matter-of-factly.

SC: It had a very short release when it first came out. Callie Angell
at the Whitney is working on restoring it and re-releasing it.

VD: How long has it been since you've seen it.

BH: Ages and ages.

VD: What year did it come out?

BH: 1964, 1965 somewhere along there

VD: What other films did you do with Andy?

BH: They weren't called screen tests then. What I was told was the
film was 10 Beautiful Girls and then the second one was 10 More
Beautiful Girls. This was after I made Prison. I did "Andy
Warhol's L'Avventura" which takes place at the L'Avventura
Restaurant on 2nd Avenue.

VD: I love the Antonioni film with my favorite Italian actress
Monica Vitti. I love her in Modesty Blaise.

BH: We'd be hanging out and somebody would say, "Let's go to
dinner at Blabity-Blah" and in most circles, they would have dumped
the kid off, but not with Andy. Of course I was going. It was
very embracing. My age did not exclude me. You are like that too. You
won't be ghetto-ized, not by a black ghetto or sex ghetto. You mix it
up. Gay/straight young/ old

VD: Lowlifes and highlifes

BH: Andy believed in that

VD: It's the perfect mix.

BH: That's something that has had a profound influence on me

VD: Yeah, you cultivate that. It's a perfect balance.

BH: It's a shared aesthetic that brought us together instantly. I've
been a fan of yours since the minute I met you.

VD: And I knew you were a woman of substance immediately. I knew you'd
be a part of my life. And that's what has connected you to so many
people. You have this wonderful sense of whimsy and youthful abandon.
You are a true libertine in the sense that you don't see any boundaries.
You live life to its utter fullness. You're the ultimate modern woman. I
remember that time when you ran Troy Café and I brought
Ghislaine, that hot boyish French girl...

BH: Hush! my husband is right here listening to all this.

VD: We're giving away her lesbianic tendency secrets.

SC: Well I had the hots for Ghislaine too.

VD/BH (Laughing)

VD: You are one progressive couple. You two have such a complete
understanding of each other.

SC: We both can appreciate a hot buttered bull dyke.

VD: Gotta get a dyke to work for you. They can build you one mean bull
dagger deck.

SC: Have you seen them driving a fork lift?

VD: Back in the Warhol days, you weren't thinking in terms of
a career. You weren't careerist?

BH: No, I was just hanging out. We also abused vast amounts of
substances.

VD: Did you do a lot of drugs back then?

SC: Her attorney advises her not to answer that question.

BH: It was very much the times. It's a shame so many adorable
wonderful people, people I've loved so very much, gave their lives to
all that. I'm lucky to be a survivor.

VD: The difference with you is that while you partook, it never ruled
you. The main part of your concsciousness has been fueled through art
not narcotics. Art is in your blood. On your mother's side and on your
father's side.

BH: I was fortunate enough and blessed enough to have something to
hang on to.

VD: How long were you in New York doing projects.?

BH: I took some sojourns. I went to the Virgin Islands. I
wound up in reform school. Jail. I was in and out of reform school.
Finally they locked me up. I was a wild teenager. Beyond out of control.
I can't imagine having a girl child like me now. I got in trouble with
the law doing illegal things. Probably best not to talk about those
things.

VD: There is a statute of limitations I don't think they can prosecute
you now, dear.

BH: I was involved with shady dealings. There were some scams that
blew up, dicey stuff, you know--the usual: murder & mayhem, a big
drug bust and a few sex scandals, and at the same time I wasn't going to
school and I wasn't at home. It all got me a lot of the wrong kind of
attention. So there wasn't a lot my family could do to protect me at
that point.

VD: Your dad was an artist, he was a wild bohemian.

BH: It was a crazy wild madcap time. They eventually put me someplace
for a very long time and this was in upstate New York. Basically--well,
it was hard to get out. Then crazy summer when everyone died Martin
Luther King, Bobby Kennedy--my mother died that year too.

VD: Audrey Hansen. Your mother was another great beauty. She
was a stripper.

BH: She was quite a character. My mother was originally supposed to
play Sabrina in the movie. The Audrey Hepburn role. She was a
dancer on the old Perry Como Show. She was the one who did the
Thumbalina dance in Perry Como's hand. She was in those old
commercials that were done live. One of the famous ones was the one she
goofed up, where the girl comes onscreen in elegant profile and gets her
cigarette lit. Then she turns to the camera to exhale and coughs half a
lung out. She could be very silly and fun. She was also in a couple of
movies.

VD: You inherited her aesthetics.

BH: She loved to play; she loved to go out. Her big pals were two gay
brothers Donald and Harold. She would go out cruising with them
and their friends, but she would be dressed in drag as a little sailor
boy and they would go all over the city picking up guys together in gay
bars.

VD: That's very Last Exit to Brooklyn.

SC: Its very Querelle.

VD: I heard a story about your mother tutoring gangsters.

BH: Real gangsters, New York toughs. After she divorced her third
husband she went through her official gangster period. Jimmy Shapiro
my stepfather, he was from a very important New York Jewish family. His
mother, Rose Shapiro, was Chairman of the Board of Education
of NYC for 12 years. She owned Fabrege Perfume with her
half-brother Sam Rubin.

After that relationship was ended she came back to New York and got an
apartment on the upper west side and started hanging out at these cafe
society nightclubs like 21, The Pompeii Club, and the
Stork Club. And meeting all these characters. One of them was
Charlie Walker, the heir to the Hiram Walker whiskey
fortune. My Uncle Charlie. He was hilarious and he moved in with us for
a while. My mother would be off in Boston scoring cocaine for "
Uncle Charlie" and he would babysit me. He was always
snockered, sloshed out of his mind. Constantly inebriated. He would read
me Wuthering Heights with a real Yorkshire dialect, I loved
that; and he would take me to school. He drove a black Jaguar. He'd pick
me up we'd eat pizza and he'd read to me.

VD: My mother use to read out loud to me and act out stories from the
Bible. That made me become this theatrical person.

BH: During this period my mother met a lot of different characters.

VD: Well you took from your mother all right, associating with all the
dregs of society. That's a trait in your family.

BH: At one point she was enamored with hanging out in cafes and
niteclubs where she met these strange New York underworld figures.
Thieves, society degenerates and gangsters. All these different
characters she was hobnobbing with. Hi-life and lo-life types. One of
the lasting images I have as a child, is waking up early one morning to
go to school and hearing music in the distance. I went out into the hall
and saw my mother's door ajar. I stood in the shadows and peeked in.
She's is in bed dressed like Jean Harlow wearing a lilac pegnoir. She's
got a long cigarette holder and she's waving it around like she's
conducting an orchestra. She's talking non-stop, "If you listen
right here, listen very carefully to this part, it sounds like a beer
bottle going through the window--Now! Ah! There it is! Do you hear it?"
At the foot of her bed are these four thugs, sitting in straightback
chairs. It's 7:00 in the morning and she's giving music appreciation
lessons to these guys. I remember one of these characters was Man
Mountain Dean.

VD: Who is that?

BH: He was a wrestler. And they are really concentrating hard.

VD: How "Brush up on Your Shakespeare".

BH: It was right out of Damon Runyon. They were trying so hard
to stay awake and pay attention. And all of these guys were so nice to
me. They would always slip me $10 or $20 dollar bill. And there was this
one character named Bobby very tall and very thin very Jimmy Stewart
lanky and pale. He was quiet and watery and he gave me this huge stuffed
bunny rabbit and some cash money and he said, "Youse a cute
kid--here get yourself and your friends some soda or somethin."
then he pointed at the rabbit and warned: "And don't tell nobody I
give it to you. I got a reputation, you know!"

VD: Your mother was half Swedish and Jewish.

BH: Yeah, her mother was Jewish. My father is Norwegian--a Viking. We
are the black sheeps of black sheeps of black sheeps in our family. This
has been going on for a very long time. When it came time for my kids to
rebel they did they only thing that they could--they became successful
in both their personal lives and careers. That's all they could do to
really act out against me.

VD: Well your eldest is what could be described as the epitome of
success. Most mothers would dream of their child becoming that
successful, admired and respected.

BH: Yes, he's sober, stable, hardworking, has a fantastic
relationship, and he is understanding, considerate, a decent human
being, My other son is, amazingly enough, a college grad. From the Art
Institute in San Francisco.

VD: Yeah, Channing is more like you. He has that Hansen thing going
strong.

BH: Well, he's an artist.

VD: He is a rebel. He has a good job right now but I can see him
dropping it in a second and going off into the hills with his four
lovers . . .

BH: Well that's the gene from my side of the family.

SC: He has a child now, and he is an amazing father.

VD: You've never lived a traditional life for very long.

BH: I did for a little while. I wanted to know what it was like.

VD: When you lived with your first husband, you lived more of a
traditional life after the struggling days before your husband became
well known. Some hippy dippy times.

BH: Oh, I was never a hippy.

SC: She doesn't know what "Inna Gadda Da Vida"
means. She has never worn anything tie-dyed.

BH: David actually was a bit hippy and maybe there is one photo of me
looking a little hippy but it was a costume, a joke, and I was made up
to look like that.

VD: That makes sense since you didn't have to go through any middle
class rebellion. You grew up in a non-traditional counter cultural,
bohemian environment. You never needed that kind of affectation. You've
always been very sophisticated.

BH: I went from beatnik to mod to punk to international cultural
bourgeoisie with no stops in between.

VD: I've seen pictures of you from the 60's and you pretty much look
and dress the same now as you did then. Very streamlined, sleek and
modern. You had a clean aesthetic, clean lines. You've never gone with
trends, you have always had the same amazing style. Since being a
teenager. You know what looks good on you....

SC: When you see pictures of her at age 13 and 14 she looks hot then--

VD: And now

SC: Most people are embarrased by old pictures of themselves, mainly
because of the hair. Not Bibbe.

VD: She knew intuitively what worked for her. She always looked good.
You had your own mind set from an early age. You took a lot of risk
along the way, no whining, no excuses. You lived your life to its
fullest. Took responsibility. Like leaving your husband and capturing a
teenage Chicano lover. You never worry about what people think. You
don't compromise. You stay completely true to yourself. That is what has
made you stand out. That's what keeps you young.

BH: Stop! I'm blushing!

VD: We jump to the part where you met Sean and got involved with the
punk scene. Sean was the youngest member of Asco. The art
collective. Sean was making movies too.

SC: Yeah, when I met Bibbe I was just this teenage kid, and she
already knew everything about me and everyone in Asco in the
group and the Chicano art movement of that time. She knew our history,
where we came from, what we were about. She knows her shit. She is with
the trends before they happen in the art world. When I first met her I
said I'm going to marry that bleep. I grew up Catholic so that's all I
could say. I still go to confession once a week.

VD: That's good. I'm not Catholic and I go to mass every day. I find
it comforting. I love the rituals involved in Catholicism.

BH: I like the frankincense

SC: Honey, its drag queen heaven. I don't really go to church--only to
confession because I like being in a creepy dark booth with a priest.
It's sexy. I loved being an altar boy. All of the Catholic rituals are
like a Genet story. I mean, come on . . . once a year the
highest priest in your area washes the feet of ten bums, is that like
shrimping or what. Everybody shows up for that one, even people who
don't go to church come for that spectacle.

VD: I was obsessed with Catholic ritual as a child though I was raised
a Jehovah's Witness. Our church was too modest. My mother though wasn't
the best Witness because she didn't obey all the rules. She was too
rebellious. She believed, but didn't obey everything to the letter. She
was what was considered disfellowshipped. She was a bad Jehohah's
Witness. We didn't celebrate Christmas or birthdays, but that was more
because she was cheap, and since we were on welfare that was a good
excuse not having presents and things, and my mother thrives on excuses.
And she likes when people feel sorry for her. She did buy Christmas
cards and send them to people. There was something about buying the
funky cards she liked. And I got to address them all and put on stamps,
which I loved. I got to show off my excellent penmanship, my beautiful
cursive handwriting and she had this old fashion fountain pen that I
loved using.

We didn't celebrate our own birthdays but once in a while depending
her mood, if someone invited us to a birthday party she would let us go.
And when we lived in the projects she would buy candy to give to the
kids on Halloween, but she never let us trick or treat because Halloween
was a demonic holiday that glorifed satanic doings. We lived in such a
religious household and my mother read the bible out loud to me and
re-enacted things elaborately like your Uncle Charlie. I don't deny my
religious upbringing because that helped shape me into becoming this
creature known as Ms. Davis.

SC: Its part of who you are. One of my brothers is a priest.

BH: I come from a very old Jewish family--the Rosenbergs. Abraham
Rosenberg was my great grandfather, and he was actually the first
president of the International Ladies Garment Workers Union.

VD: So you come from Jewish activist union stock. No wonder you get
along so well with Harold Meyerson, who is a political writer
and specializing in labor & union issues.

BH: Abe is mentioned in a lot of books and he wrote a book called "My
Life as a Cloak-Maker". Unfortunately, I don't know that side
of the family. My mother had a certain Jewish identification in speech
and mannerisms And my stepfather was Jewish. She never was actually very
religious, except for the period when she was having an affair with the
abbot of a monastary--a Catholic priest. That was her Catholic period.
Actually, as a youngster, I went to Presbyterian Sunday school. I spent
the first couple of years in an all black community in Novia Scotia
called Africatown. The matriarch of this community was a
wonderful woman named Old Rose and she had a daughter--Rowena--and
I was left in their care for the first several years of my life. I sort
of went between them and Chickie Lantini. Chickie slept at the
foot of my mother's bed and she took care of me when I was in NYC with
my mother. She was bartender at a dyke bar. I don't think they slept
with each other. I think it was just a worship relationship where she
was in awe of my mother and was in her service. There were several
people of different sexes who slept at the foot of my mother's bed at
different times. She had quite a following. So between my lesbian
Catholic/Italian nanny Chickie and Old Rose, the black lady in Nova
Scotia who took me to a Holy Rollers Baptist Church every
Sunday, I had some pretty heavy Christian influences. I still remember
that Baptist church to this day. The singing, the energy, the
enthusiasm.

VD: How could you forget?

BH: I loved playing with the other little kids, after church and
Sunday School. We played games like Little Sally Saucer outside
in the church yard.

VD: You don't look Jewish, you look Waspy with your strawberry blonde
hair. You didn't live the Jewish girl life that much did you?

BH: In a way I did, because my stepdad was Jewish. And there were all
those Theodore Bikel records in the house. It was the Fifties and we
weren't allowed to join the country club because we were Jews. My mother
got into a bar brawl in a little upstate town . It was a catfight with
some woman who started yelling, that the "Lousy kikes are messing
up our town". So my mother hauled off and decked her. I remember
getting turned away from hotels back then--they were "restricted"
which meant "no Jews". So we were Jewish enough to be
discriminated against. Meanwhile my father Al Hansen and many of his
pals were into Zen--that was a Fifties thing. Sixties too. So because of
all this, I was opened to different religious ideas. As a teen I was an
atheist, of course. Then suddenly, somewhere in there, I realized I was
really Jewish.

VD: Were Beck and Channing raised Jewish?

BH: Yeah, a bit. More than I was anyway.

SC: Yeah, when Jewish girls find out Beck is Jewish the just go crazy,
cuz they feel that they can now bring him home to meet the folks. Its
really important to his Jewish girl fans.

BH: Jewish men always liked me because I looked kind of aryan. Though
not entirely quite. I've always had the not-quite-caucasian thing about
me. Even the Swede in me is part Lapp. As in Lapplander. Same
(pronounced: Sah-mee). That's what they call themselves over there. In
Sweden, I'm related to Bibi Lindstrom. Ingmar Bergman's
art director and set designer. During the Persona period. The
early to middle Bergman period. She was an artist, well-known in her
time. She was an inspriration to my mother. My mother's family was a bit
dark and serious. Her step-mother and father were pretty horrendous and
abusive people from what I've heard.

We're going to Sweden and Norway with the Beck & Al Hansen:
Playing with Matches exhibition. The show started in Santa
Monica Museum of Art, then it went to New York City to the Thread
Waxing Space, and then Winnipeg at Plug-In Editions.

SC: Hot art town, Winnipeg; it's our kind of town, just too cold.

BH: Then Vancouver Art Beatus Gallery. So hip! They first
introduced to the West many of the fabulous hot new Asian artists that
are now appearing in that wonderful Asian art show that's touring now--"Inside
Out". Art Beatus is based in Hong Kong with galleries
there and in Vancouver. But they do shows all over the world. They
discover what is new and hot everywhere. Not just Asian either. They did
a full-on Basquiat show with catalogue. And they did the "Beck
& Al Hansen Playing With Matches" show. They're like
us--they like to "mix it up".

Next we are going to Japan to open Playing With Matches at the
LaForet Museum in Tokyo as well as Fukuoka and Nagoya. The show
is booked through the year 2000 with shows in Banff, Canada; Cleveland,
Ohio; Kingston, Ontario; PA; Kentucky--on and on. We're going to be in
Canada and the US right after Japan; then Europe, the Scandinavian
countries and Germany.

SC: Where Al is already huge. And Scandinavia

BH: Some of these galleries mightn't have done the show if there
wasn't the Beck connection, but once they see the work, it stands on its
own.

VD: They need the exposure to Al's work.

BH: Critics have said that Al deserves a major retrospective.

SC: That is what Roberta Smith of the New York Times
said in her review of the show; her last line was that Al Hansen
deserves a major American museum retrospective.

VD: Well they give it up to all these lame people, Al really deserves
it.

BH: A lot of what happens in the world in any circumstance is
political. It boils down to money and power and the distribution of that
and how it's gonna work and underneath all that, are real ideas, are
things of substance and value for the ages that transcend styles and
trends and who's friends with who, who's investment is in this kind of
art or that kind, and who gets to become a player and who doesn't. When
the dust clears from the 20th Century, I believe that Al's body of work
will really stand out. Not just the art, but also his philosphies of art
education and art process and theory.

SC: He wrote a book in 1965 on performance art. It's called, "A
Primer of Happenings and Time/Space Art"

BH: How he lived his life was completely consistent with his ideas.

VD: He was the consumate artist. That was passed down to you and you
passed it on to Beck and Channing. Your kids couldn't help but be
artists.

BH: Al had that inclusiveness that we were talking about earlier. He
wasn't precious about what he did and how he did it. He was endlessly
fascinated by other people's work and how they did it and young people
and children and the developing artist and emerging artist and artist in
embryo

VD: I know he was very supportive of me. Very generous. True artists
aren't selfish. It wasn't all about him. He really gave back.

SC: He was a big fan of yours. He would play videotapes he made of you
rehearsing at Troy with Cholita to me in Germany. He had a TV but it had
no antenna and no cable, so he couldn't watch TV. All he did was play
tapes on theVCR and you were his favorite entertainment. He had hours of
footage

VD: I remember he'd have that funny look on his face.

BH: He loved your songs-- "Size Has Nothing To Do With
Performance" and "I'm Not A Puta; I'm A Princess"

VD: He recognized everything that was new. That's why he got into the
punk scene.

SC: Then he made sure that Bibbe got into the scene.

BH: He came to LA from New York one year. Brought all these records
with him and got me to go to these shows here. And in 24 hours I had
punks living in my garage, sleeping on the couch, in the driveway,
hanging out on the porch. Darby Crash, KK, DOA Dan, Kid Spike, Alice
Bag, Carla Mad Dog... It was Scout Troop 666.

SC: Bibbe instantly embraced all of this.

BH: They were all a bunch of sweet kids. My father did a punk zine and
I took pictures of all the bands for him: The Screamers with
KK, Tomato and Tommy Gear, the Germs, the Dils, the Controllers.

SC: Gorgeous pictures. That's the common thread running through her
life and career. Why did her kids grow up to be these incredible
musicians and artists--because there were punk rockers sleeping in the
house day and night.

VD: They got it through osmosis.

SC: From an early age Beck and Channing were not these little kids,
but little artists.

VD: I've learned from Bibbe and Al Hansen. When you got together with
Sean he opened a whole new world for you. The east LA punk art scene and
you opened a new world for him with the international art world. You
guys have an art union. It's a complete art marriage.

SC: We're slackers

VD: You guys never worry about money.

BH: When you don't have any, there's nothing to worry about. One
question that amazed me that journalists would ask around these recent
shows? How did I feel, or how did I imagine my father would feel, that
Beck is so wildly famous, while Al never had that kind of fame in his
life? How silly! Al was into "Fine Art" and was an avant garde
artist, and fine artists don't get that kind of fame. It's not in that
program. Not like show business. Beck is a "pop musician".
Fame is part of that.

VD: Al never compared himself to others people and Bibbe doesn't
compare herself.

SC: Al never said a negative thing about other artists. When he died
he had all this art from other artists. Lichtenstein, Takako
Saito, Ben Patterson, Ben Vautier and other people. After he got
paid from his art dealer he'd take the money and buy other people's
work.

VD: Bibbe lives for art, taking the time, spending hours talking to
people. Café Troy and those marathon sessions of talking.

BH: During the riots, we were ground zero for all the art scene
protesters. When they had the demonstration at Parker Center,
everyone was overturning cop cars and burning things down--then they
would all run back to Troy, grab a coffee and critique
themselves on TV. Then they'd dash back out to re-join the action.
Nowhere in this country has civil disobedience been performance art more
than with the artists and kids hanging around Troy Café
during the LA Riots.

VD: Your hand-picked beauties.

BH: You took them over and made "black fag" with
them.

VD: But I found them at Troy. Gorgeous Chicano boys, and hot
pieces of rice: Chinese, Japanese, Korean

SC: Innocent beauty.

VD: And the cute white boys too. That New Republic article
about Troy and you and Bibbe and the Café really captured what
was going on and what you guys were all about and doing.

SC: A natural blending of different races and ideologies. Nothing
forced. It was multicultural in its true sense not just a pat phrase. It
wasn't some tired art grift. Art, music, sex brought all these people
together--it was beautiful. People in their 80 and 90's to toddlers. We
even had the homeless people in the area involved. I sometimes go down
there for old time sake and smoke a lil crack with them.

BH: Just a lil crack.

VD: Your oldest son is a critical and commercial success. He
cultivated having a long career.

BH: I am his fan and his mother. I'm proud of him.

VD: Yeah, he knows how to back his excrement up. The body of works he
created. People haven't seen even half of it.

BH: They were born in Pico-Union district. During the punk scene we
were living in the "Hollywood Flats"

VD: You're little Miss New York. A child of the streets and you
brought that sensibility to Los Angeles. Now it's ready for your
comeback.

BH: I owe that to you. I've worked with Andy Warhol, Jonas Mekas,
Brian De Palma. I have never enjoyed working with someone more than
when I've worked with you in The White To Be Angry and of course
doing the band "black fag" together.

BH: You're my favorite director, but Brian DePalma gave better
head.

VD & SC: Break out laughing.

BH: Your're very nurturing. I'm doing this movie next with John
Aes-Nihil.

VD: I've done two films with him.

VD: You are a theatre and video and film director yourself.

SC: Bibbe does it all.

VD: Bibbe is the surrogate mother to so many people.

BH: I enjoy people.

VD: I know that Bibbe has always nurtured me, being a neurotic talent,
I'm always in denial and doubt.